Most conventional browsers track and record browsing history of a user as they navigate to different sites on the Internet or other network. Typically a browser records the universal resource locator (URL) addresses of different sites as the user enters or selects different sites to navigate to, such as news sites, social networking sites, email portals, or other sites. Many browsers then permit a user to view their recent browser history to reload or return to one of the sites they have recently visited.
The browsing history that is captured by the browser and available to the user is not, however, always fully useful or informative to the user. One difficulty in reconstructing navigation history is that many Web sites contain a complex hierarchy of subsections, each with various distinct or extended URLs. For instance, a user arriving at the Web site of a large media vendor may be presented with choices to navigate into one section for movie downloads, one section for music downloads, and another section for ordering books. The browsing history function of available browsers will capture the top-level URL of the visited sites, but may or may not record the navigation history through the various subsections of a site. Thus a user may only be directed back to the home page associated with the top-level URL of a site, as opposed to the subsection of interest, such as books in the example noted.
Upon selecting the site from the browser history the user may therefore be forced to re-navigate to the section of interest. It may furthermore be difficult for the browser logic to discriminate sections of interest at a site, given fairly length or complex URLs associated with different sections of a site that have no clear relation to other URLs for other sections of the site. It may be desirable to provide methods and systems to better capture, clarify, and update a user's browsing history.